About
Hey, I'm Dan. I work as a software engineer at Canva, mostly on the frontend with regular detours into infrastructure, DevOps, and lately AI. I've been there about four years.
Before Canva I spent time at Dolby and MoneyLoop. Before that I tutored and did research at UNSW, where I'd just finished a double degree in Computer Science and Mechatronic Engineering.
This page is the longer version — what I've worked on, what I'm into outside work, and the stuff I'm quietly proud of.
Path
2022 — Present
Sydney
Canva
Software Engineer (Senior since April 2025)
Started on the frontend, building marketing-communication flows that opt users in across countries with stricter consent rules — Germany, the UK, the rest of the EU. Spent a lot of time on the systems internal teams use to send emails and push notifications, plus the compliance and GDPR-adjacent controls that keep us out of trouble. Lately I've been picking up more infrastructure, DevOps and AI work alongside the frontend.
2021 — 2022
Sydney
Dolby Laboratories
Software Engineer
Worked on revamping a tech stack that needed it. Spent time on reliability and developer experience, and a fair bit on database optimisations that made everything noticeably snappier.
2019 — 2020
Sydney
MoneyLoop
Software Engineer
Built MoneyLoop's customer-facing website in React with a responsive design — the first proper end-to-end web project I shipped. Also dug into their internal Loan Management System and made the database queries actually performant.
2016 — 2021
Sydney
UNSW
Casual Academic & Research Assistant
Five years across two different roles. Tutored across a stack of subjects — security engineering, mechatronics, modelling and control — and earlier worked as a research assistant in biomedical engineering, helping run experiments and tidy up papers for publication.
Education
UNSW
Bachelor of Computer Science and Bachelor of Mechatronic Engineering (first class honours), as a double degree.
Stuff I'm proud of
Co-author on a paper about pressure profiling for next-generation lymphedema compression treatment.
Read the paper →Three hackathon and design-challenge finalist finishes — more to come on what each one was actually about.
Outside the laptop
When I'm not at a keyboard I cook most nights, get out into nature when I can, spend time in the garden (results vary), read more books than I finish, and keep finding excuses to start small robotics projects.
The homepage covers the food and travel side; this is the longer story.
If any of this lands with you, let's connect.